


Use My Head Alongst My Heart

by theyoungdaydreamer



Series: Somewhere, Somewhen [2]
Category: The Yogscast
Genre: SuperYogs AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-29
Updated: 2019-04-29
Packaged: 2020-02-10 00:58:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18649678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theyoungdaydreamer/pseuds/theyoungdaydreamer
Summary: Tawny's got a patrol to do, but some newcomers have arrived to stress her out.





	Use My Head Alongst My Heart

Tawny crouched on the rooftop and observed the gathering below. It was past midnight, past a respectable time to be hanging out in alleys like these people were. Not to mention, the passing around of masks and the glint of weaponry in hands was very suspicious. This wasn’t your common dark alley drug deal.

The dark intent of the four, no, five people, became clear as one of them kept a lookout up the street, watching a bank’s lights get gradually shut off as the late-night employees left. It was clear someone’s ass was going to get kicked.

Tawny went to send a message from her phone but stopped herself the last second. Khaz Modan was off dealing with another break in somewhere else in the district. She didn’t have the number of Sipsman, though he had acknowledged this last week. It had been during their last crime fighting encounter, when he had said that having a network would be beneficial for serious jobs. Sjinergy she’d seen around, but he was too messy for people who weren’t obviously powered, even if she did have his number.

And Xephos was gone.

The last call to his phone she’d accidentally tried was picked up by a cruel prankster. She’d thought it was him for a minute, the voice exactly his. He’d had her right up until the chuckles had started and the twisted person piloting her ex had revealed his true colours. Her Xephos was beyond calling now.

But she would be enough. Confidence was key on the job. Doubting yourself lead to hesitation in situations where acting was crucial. Hesitation lead to terrible mistakes.

Tawny watched as one stayed back, shut themselves in a car. A getaway vehicle, it seemed. The other four moved on around the corner, and so she dropped herself down using the window frames as handholds and footholds. She stuck to the shadows, ducked a little behind the car. Inside he was difficult to reach. He had weapons handy. The stiff silhouette looked forwards, not back. What reason did they have to look behind them?

With the driver on the right side, she perched on the left corner and readied a featherrang. She aimed for the bins at the back of the alley and threw it. The bang of the edge as it struck the bin was loud, loud enough for her to mask her quick steps as she moved around the side of the car. The driver, spooked and not thinking straight, opened their door and stepped out, shutting it behind them.

“Hello?” He said, gun in hand.

Eyes flitting around the darkness, he did not see her stalk around the front of the car and stop at his heels. She unclipped her mace from her belt and stood up straight. She raised it and struck the back of head with a solid blow. His body crumpled on the ground, but she had his arms behind his back and zip tied within ten seconds. She dragged him further into the shadows of the alley and sat him up, reclaiming her featherrang at the same time.

She expected to hear voices when she came closer to the bank, a couple of quickly smothered whimpers of the tellers whose shifts should have ended peacefully. There were screams, she heard as she jogged towards the banks, terrified screams. Her heart jumped into her throat. If things had gone south this quickly then the survival rate of the victims was going down substantially.

She and the frantic thoughts in her head stopped dead in their tracks as the door to the bank swung open and one of the robbers ran out. She barely took in his wide-eyed panicked expression, mouth open in a high scream, before he was blocked off and his voice choked out. Out of nowhere, out of thin air, a costumed and hooded figure appeared in front of the robber.

“Boo.” The figure said.

The robber had skidded to a halt and fallen on his back after losing his balance, head cracking against the path. The figure wore a grey tabard, belts crossed over their chest and around their waist. As they lowered their arm she spotted wrist guards, both ends of a scarf gripped in their hand. A glowing orb was resting in the curve of the middle, ready to sling at the robber. It didn’t look good for him.

With her shock dealt with her fighting mind kicked in.

“Oi!” She yelled.

The figure stopped, their arm only barely lifted. They jerked around, saw her.

She stepped forward. “Who are you?”

They said nothing. Their face was covered by a mask, a painted monster expression on it. Little purple motes of light flitted around their head, like smoke if it could be captured in the tiniest pin pricks, phasing in and out.

“Leave.” He said.

“I think not.” She said, hand drifting to her mace.

He vanished in a cloud of those purple motes. A bare millisecond later the mace was in her hand. A moment later he appeared beside her. He yanked at the mace. Her grip was strong, but he weren’t trying to wrestle it off her. Her hand closed around air so suddenly her fingernails dug in her palm a little. There were motes on her hand. Motes that tingled even through her glove.

“You…bastard.” She said.

He withdrew his hand from the space and took a step back. “They would kill for money.” He said. There was blood on his hand, the smallest splatter, but she could recognise fresh blood extremely well. “They’re no great loss.”

“I can’t let you kill them!” She said, moving into a fighting stance. “This isn’t justice.”

Her mind was racing, keeping notes. Super. Teleporter. Sling weapon. Contact risky. Brutal concept of justice.

He sighed. “I don’t have time for this.” He walked back towards the concussed and whimpering robber.

“Leave him.” She said. “No one else needs to die tonight.”

He looked down at the prone robber, clenched his fists. “More people will always die if scum like this continue to exist.”

“Kill this man and you’re worse.” She said. Without her mace she risked him teleporting something else of hers, like her damn head. “Go before I have to do something I regret.”

“Because you really think that the law will deal true justice when punishing these criminals?” He scoffed.

“Because you teleported my bloody mace away!” She yelled.

He looked at her again. A siren wailed in the distance, coming closer and closer.

“You’re not doing enough.” He said. “And I know you’ll never do more.”

“Why you-” She ran for him then, ready to punch him right in the disrespectful mug.

But then her phone rang.

_Alert! Alert! It’s your phone and I’m ringing! Pick me up!_

It was so jarring she didn’t follow after the vigilante as he took a step back. She glanced down at the pocket her phone was strapped into and by the time she looked up again there was only a cloud of purple motes.

“Perfect.” She said.

The police sirens were definitely getting louder. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to be near the scene of the crime when they arrived, her connection with the law being tenuous as it was. She zip tied the traumatised robber still on the ground and then went just inside the bank to check on the tellers.

Inside it was a mess, the bodies of the three other robbers in puddles of blood, patches burnt off where liquids had eaten into their clothes and flesh. The couple of tellers who’d been hostages mere minutes ago were still crouched in shock behind the counters. They were untouched.

“Tawny?” One gasped. “I pressed the alarm when I saw the masks. I thought we’d be dead before someone came.”

“I’m sorry I came as fast as I could.” She said. “The police are on their way and they’ll be here soon, so I can’t linger. Are you all unharmed?”

“Yes.” She said. Her eyes kept darting between her and the bodies on the floor. “They aren’t though.”

“I’m sorry you had to see that.” She went over to the bodies and prodded each one with a toe of her boot, just in case. “I haven’t seen that guy before.”

“They had powers.” She said.

“Yes.” Said Tawny. “Now, I need you to remember this, so you can tell the police.”

“Sure. Yeah.”

“There are two robbers surviving and zip tied. One is just outside the bank, the other is by their getaway vehicle in the alley just down there. Those were the ones I dealt with. I don’t want these three to be wrongly attributed to me, alright?”

“Alright.”

“You’re safe now.” Tawny said. “You did just fine.”

And as she watched the police arrive from the rooftops nearby she took her mask off and put her head in her hands.

*

Lomadia graded papers in her shared office because if she did it at home she’d neglect it. If she didn’t have work she would train all night until she collapsed in bed from exhaustion. She hadn’t found the Mace of Wisdom and she had cursed that purple punk all the way back home.

Her office hours would be quiet this week, since all work had already been handed in for her to mark. Her mind kept wandering back to her encounter with the teleporting vigilante, her failure to talk him down. She had found that talking to other crimefighters usually went better, but then again, they didn’t usually kill people so easily. Sjinergy had that capability, she knew, had seen the craters left behind from where he’d fought villains with powers, but he’d never purposely killed anyone.

She reached for her mug and found it empty, letting out a frustrated sigh as she put it down again. Her pen dropped from her hand, but she wasn’t so out of it she didn’t catch it just before it rolled off the desk. She stood up and grabbed her mug, walking out down the corridor to the breakroom that had tea and biscuits in. If there was anyone else there she felt like any attempt to communicate with her in this state would break her.

She leaned against the counter as she waited for the kettle to boil, breathing carefully despite the fact she didn’t have any fresh bruises to worry about. There had been times when she had called in sick because of how beaten her body had been after a night out on patrol, grudgingly emailing her classes out their work before passing out.

Lomadia thought back to when Xephos was in her life, those months ago when someone gave a shit about her from her normal life. When she stumbled back to her apartment after a night stopping crime she would undress and clean herself before passing out from exhaustion, those rooms cold and dark. Xephos had bathed her, given her hot water bottles and medicine. He had let her sob into his shoulder when it all got too much for her. He had been so good to her, and she doubted there would ever be another man in her life like him.

The kettle clicked off and she made herself breakfast tea, ready to go back to work marking but with a packet of bourbons in tow. She was walking down the corridor with her drink wobbling precariously when she spotted a student ahead of her. Seeing someone wasn’t particularly alarming, seeing as it was a public university, but they came out of a particular office.

“Hello.” Lomadia said. “You alright there?”

The student turned, wide eyed. Her hair was bright red, freckle faced and short, she wore a crop top and jeans from some expensive brand. She looked surprised, like she’d just been caught out.

“Uh.” She said.

“Are you looking for someone?” She coaxed.

“Professor Lomadia?” The student asked.

“I am she.”

“Alright.” The student brightened up, forced herself to relax. She closed the open flap of the satchel hanging over her shoulder. “I wanted to ask you about one of your talks.”

“Of course.” She was eyeing the biscuits slowly slipping out of her grip. “Do you want to take this into my office?”

“Uh, no, no. That’s not necessary. I just wanted to confirm you were doing that talk on the creation of mechanical wings next week.”

“Yes.” She nodded. “I presume I should look out for you there?”

“Zoey, and yes.”

Lomadia watched her slowly back away.

“Well I presume you have somewhere you want to be right now.”

“Yes, so I’ll see you around.” Zoey grinned. “Goodbye.”

“Bye.” She said weakly, watching the girl turn and stride away.

Even when she was out of sight around the corner of the corridor Lomadia stayed stock still, frowning after her. Something about Zoey had rubbed her wrong, her guilty actions. She moved slowly to her office, peering in. Nothing.

She went to put her tea and biscuits down on her desk and noticed there was something wrapped in newspaper leaning against her chair, a folded note attached by a slither of tape. Lomadia glanced over her shoulder out of habit, saw she was not being observed, and poked the package. It was a heavy stick, more bits jutting out from one end than from the other, much thinner and smoother.

“No.” She breathed.

She poked it with a finger. Not a bomb, she hoped. She stuck a whole bourbon in her mouth and chewed thoughtfully.

She picked it up and laid it down on her desk. There was a letter opener on her desk, a posh gift from her parents when she’d first got her job. She sliced through the newspaper and folded it back to take a look at what it was. At the skinny end she caught sight of the wooden handle and leather wrappings of a mace. _Her_ mace.

She tore the rest of the paper off in a frenzy, turning it over and over to make sure it was undamaged. The note she seized off the table, teeth gritted and other hand clenched into a fist.

_Sorry about being so threatening and losing your mace. We’re trying to be better and hopefully not have such a terrible encounter ever again. Here we return it to you._

_Rythian + Miniata_

_P.S We’re not going to tell anyone_

“Bloody kids.” Lomadia muttered. She shoved the note in her handbag and sat down. He head began throbbing with the beginnings of a headache, her mind straining in its comprehension of this stupidity. “How the bloody hell am I supposed to fit it in my bag? This is going to be a such a pain in the ass.” She sighed.

As if the city needed more supers running around.

**Author's Note:**

> Guess who used an edited version of this for a course submission lmao  
> Jammed to Mumford and Sons writing this and boy was it a good time


End file.
